During the development stage, numerous tests spending long hours must be carried out to tackle the power sequence designed for the main board. Please refer to FIG. 1, which is a schematic view showing the configuration for conducting the conventional AC power supply testing method for a main board. The configuration includes a main board 1, an external floppy drive 2, an external controller 3, a COM port 4, an I/O interface 5, an AC power supply 6, a system power supply 7, a CPU 8 and a booting memory 9. At present, such power sequence requires to be carried out by means of a floppy drive 2, an external controller 3 and a COM port 4. The power sequence is executed in a way that after the main board 1 is booted as usual, the AC power supply 6 instructed by the controller 3 supplies power to the system power supply 7 to power on the main board and initiate the system. The operating system and the application software in the floppy drive 2 are loaded into the booting memory 9, and the program for counting down the time to power off the system and recording the power-off frequency is executed. Then the CPU 8 issues an interrupt command to the COM port 4 to inform the controller 3 of a power-off execution. After executing the power-off, the controller 3 is controlled by an adjustable resistor to schedule the next booting time. After the power is recovered, the main board automatically boots and branches to the operating system to resume an automatic AC power supply testing procedure. During when, the AC Power Loss among the BIOS setup items is set to be the power-on state.
The aforementioned main board power supply testing method has the following shortcomings. (1) It requires more space due to the use of the external floppy drive 2, the controller 3 and the COM port 4 on the main board 1 and the testing time therefor is longer. (2) It could not be implemented without the Super IO interface on the main board. (3) It supports DOS platform only so that the application thereof is limited. (4) An additional program should be written for the method to cooperate with the testing sequence. (5) It fails to display the countdown testing time, and the setup and error codes lead to an awkward operation upon testing.
Based on the above, in order to overcome the drawbacks in the prior art, the present invention provides an improved method for the AC power supply testing of the main board.